Police Commissioner Ray Kelly released a chilling account of yesterday's police interrogation of Keith Phoenix, the second man arrested this week in the hate crime murder of an Ecuadorian immigrant in Bushwick. While his partner in crime Hakim Scott was reported to have been shaken up by the death of Jose Sucuzhanay when brought in, Phoenix expressed no such remorse. Instead he asked cops, "So I killed someone—that makes me a bad guy?...What's the big deal? The guy's dead."
Police say that the investigation "began with a license plate number and little else" after a quick thinking cabbie at the scene of the crime took down the license plate of the SUV driven by Phoenix. After towing the SUV, cops were able to question one of Phoenix's girlfriends, whose vehicle he had borrowed the night of the attack.
She apparently wasn't the only lady in Phoenix's life, as he allegedly spent the three months since the crime crashing with various girlfriends throughout Manhattan, Westchester and Connecticut. Sources say he spent his days on the lam playing video games on the computer. Friday he was picked up at a Yonkers apartment on Ravine Avenue, where he had been staying at a group home that one girlfriend lived at.
When being brought into court for arraignment in Brooklyn yesterday, one onlooker shouted, “You’re not smiling now, are you?” Police had released video of Phoenix chuckling his way through the RFK Bridge tolls immediately after the crime. At the press conference announcing his arrest, Mayor Bloomberg said, “This horrible act appears to have been fueled by a deadly combination of ethnic and homophobic prejudice...This will send a message that you picked the wrong city if you want to be intolerant"
